After much head banging I finally figured out how to install AIR using the standard installer you get straight off of adobe's website:
http://get.adobe.com/air/

This is NOT the SDK! This is important because the SDK cannot update applications you have installed.

Now to begin:

The reason the AIR installer does not work on Gentoo even when RPM is installed is because the rpm database created by gentoo does not contain an entry for itself. So in order to get it to work we will inject a dummy rpm for the rpm package itself. This is done like so (change the version to match yours):

%description
The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven
package management system capable of installing, uninstalling,
verifying, querying, and updating software packages. Each software
package consists of an archive of files along with information about
the package like its version, a description, etc.

That will force rpm to install without dependencies, which might be required by some. Just put the rpm.orig back when you are done with it!

Finally because of a bug in AIR, the app installer will give you a SIGSEGV unless their config.xml file by putting <UserPreferences/> after every "<certificate ...". This can be done easily with sed like so, but make sure you check with your version that this is actually still a problem!

You can now install .air files using "/usr/bin/Adobe AIR Application Installer"

Getting AIR Programs to install through Chrome
For some reason Chrome will let you install any AIR apps unless you first go through the whole mess of installing one with firefox. Just do this to get it to work:

Not a whole lot I can do for you with that. You may need to do some looking around to see if there is some documentation on rpmbuilder segfaults. What architecture and kernel version are you on?_________________generic signature here.

I am using the rpm hack you provided (and modified it to give me the rpm call log)._________________"The problem with quotes on the internet is that it is difficult
to determine whether or not they are genuine." -- Abraham Lincoln